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STUDY: Noise, promotion and spam will reduce your Twitter followers

Following somebody on Twitter is always a small leap of faith. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out, for whatever reason.

A couple of days ago I created an online poll to try to identify the common reasons for unfollowing people on Twitter.

More than 500 votes have since been cast and as such we can now start to analyse the results.

Based on the survey, it would appear as if the worst crime you can commit as a Twitter user is to be too noisy. This was the number one reason cited by respondents for clicking the ‘unfollow’ button. 52% of people said they had waved goodbye on this basis.

In second place was too much self-promotion (48%), so shameless, narcissistic hawkers should keep an eye on their churn rate, if that kind of thing bothers them.

Also scoring highly, in third place, were those guilty of posting too much spam (47%).

At the other end of the scale, I often see people complaining about being fed up with ironic hashtags, but only 10% of people said this is a reason for unfollowing somebody.

Why do people unfollow others on Twitter: the results in full

Too noisy (tweets too often) [52% - 271 votes]

Too much self-promotion [48% - 249 votes]

Spammy [47% - 245 votes]

Not interesting enough [43% - 226 votes]

Too much repetition [29% - 152 votes]

Too much automation [29% - 151 votes]

Offensive / unprofessional [28% - 146 votes]

Too many 'begging tweets' [28% - 145 votes]

Too quiet [27% - 141 votes]

Foursquare / check-in abusers [22% - 115 votes]

No conversational tweets [21% - 108 votes]

Crimes against grammar [18% - 93 votes]

Too many retweets [17% - 90 votes]

Auto / DM abuse [16% - 86 votes]

Hashtag abusers [10% - 52 votes]

Other reasons

I also included an ‘Other’ option, to allow respondents to suggest their own reasons for unfollowing people on Twitter. Here are some of the more interesting ones:

Chris, there are three other factors which I've found in my experience.

1. Requested retweets - people in the public eye who retweet messages from followers - usually in bulk, and most often due to an overbearing guilt complex. (it's an abuse of said retweeters' follower network to use us in this way)

2. Following on from (1), I find myself unfollowing people who use Twitter sporadically. It's like someone who doesn't talk to you for weeks and then suddenly starts speaking and expecting you to listen. This is also an indicator of people who use Twitter to stroke their own egos and stop using it when the 'stroking' isn't as comforting as they'd like.

3. Finally, one I'm guilty of sometimes. If ever I've carried out an extended conversation or banter (say, more than 4 or 5 exchanges in succession), I lose half-a-dozen or more followers. I've only done so 3 or 4 times in the past 5 years, but it always loses me followers.

Conversely, I tend to pick up new followers whenever I don't tweet, which perhaps says something about my tweets... ;)

@Steve - we're all guilty of doing some of these things. Give me too much coffee and I probably become noisier. Also, you may perceive noise in a different way to me... you might have more or less tolerance for it. You're definitely right on the 'please retweet' front, though I've seen studies that suggest it works!

Ralf, to provide myself as an example - I send out between 15 and 25 tweets per day, 5/6 of those would be to promote new content I have published, 10/12 of those would be in reply to people who have mentioned or tweeted me directly, whilst around 3/4 would be other content I have discovered during the day.

I try not to tweet more 2 or 3 messages within an hour.

Provided the majority of these tweets are relevant to my follower 'group' (rather than an individual) then I either maintain or increase my follower count.

One thing I should have added in my comment yesterday is, I don't actually care how many followers I have - it's of far greater interest how much those followers interact with me, the insights they tweet back in response and the way my followers engage with each other. I'd rather have fewer followers who are real people, than thousands of voyeurs and stalkers.. (I've got close to 2,800 at the moment which feels ok)

In my view Mashable falls foul of much of the top half of the list of reasons.

So why don't we all unfollow mashable? Is it because they are the #1 source of "news" in our discipline - or is it because we don't want to be seen to be unfollowing them? We don't want to be the last person to hear about the "next big thing".

@Ralf - Good question, though I think that's a personal thing. You might be more or less noise sensitive than me!

@Steve - Definitely agree about quality of interaction. I also think it's a good idea to have a cull of spam followers from time to time.

@Vtlrockz - You could vote for more than one reason.

@Stefano - Bravo!

@Stewart - It's hard to avoid Mashable stories as they're shared around so much. It's a fantastic success story to show what happens when you encourage sharing. So popular that perhaps you don't actually need to follow them!

@chris - yes, I actually tried not following them for a while thinking I'd get it all from retweets but then ended up getting it all several times, such is the popularity of retweeting mashable! Instead I unfollowed the retweeters! :-)

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about 6 years ago

Margaret Robertson, Owner at Personal

Good survey and some interesting insights, although I think most of these comments do depend on your own tolerance levels and context. I quite like the guy/girl who is a niche subject expert but tweets about human stuff, as even in our day job there is only so much marketing advice you can handle, as long as when they do talk about their niche topic it is of value.
Mashable is tricky as often the links it refers you to are quite light on info, but overall it is worth it.
I totally agree with the snarkie/ negative thing particularly prevalent in some political folk I follow. As in real life is wearing after a while. @marob23

Hi Elena. People could vote for more than one thing (tick boxes, not radio buttons), which is why it adds up to over 100%. I know because I was one of the 500+ who voted. Hope it makes more sense now. :-)

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